The age when you could literally ‘judge the book by its cover’ has vanished! A recent report states that publishers are increasingly using Big Data to sell their book rights globally. With Digitization dominating every aspect of entertainment and infotainment, Big Data Analytics and Automation of services can prove lucrative for the publishing industry. Web app/Website is now the first place to review a book and is a potent platform to reach out to the niche readers.

As the ebook market flourishes over the years, there is a massive amount of data in store for retailers and publishers. There was a time when the publishing sector was not powered with such data, but digitization of the overall reading experience and marketing has killed all the inherent limitations of the sector.

Likewise, a recent report states that the global publishing industry has experienced positive growth over the last five years and is expected to reach US $348 billion in 2017 with a CAGR of 2.3% over the next five years. Amongst some other benefits, Internet publishing, foreign investment and easing of regulatory restrictions are bound to give a boost to the publishing industry in the near future.

E-books, E-Reading devices like Kindle are creating the right buzz and giving a makeover to the publishing industry. In this scenario, revamping and automating the digital platform is highly critical. For publishing houses, the website is the first page of the book that the readers will judge and rest their decisions.

How do you ensure that your website is giving those consistent results and offering an engaging experience to the rampant footfalls on the site? Testing is the key and Test Automation is the way to ensure your website’s expected look and feel.

With Web Application Testing it is imperative to address issues like website’s functionality, security issues, user interface, compatibility and performance. Test Automation provides a framework to run tests across browsers with no particular alterations. Importantly, it mechanically drives the same tests with a combination of various forms of data to enhance test coverage.

Some key Test Automation benefits are:

It ensures higher ROI on the initially huge investments done.

You can test 24*7 from a remotely held device as well.

There is less manual intervention, so the possibility of errors diminishes.

It makes the test scripts reusable – need new scripts every time even with changes in the version of the OS on the device and the tests can recur without any errors.

Automation helps you find bugs at an early stage.

Automated tests make the process more reliable and the tests more dependable.

Most importantly, it enables testing in volumes. For instance, it allows you to run tests on thousands of mobile devices. Now, this is impossible with Manual Testing.

Selenium is the most popularly used freeware and open source automation tool. The benefits of Selenium for Test Automation are immense. Amongst the many benefits, Selenium is an Open-Source tool and is easy to get started with for functional testing of web applications.

Importantly, it enables record and playback for testing web applications and can run multiple scripts across various browsers. Now that Selenium 3.0 is on its way and testing experts are mapping the roadmap for 4.0 and 5.0, the benefits of Selenium test automation hold relevance across diverse business segments.

Open-Source:

As mentioned earlier, the biggest strength of Selenium is that it is a freeware and a portable tool. It has no upfront direct costs involved. The tool can be freely downloaded and the support for it is freely available, as it is community-based.

Supports languages:

Selenium supports a range of languages, including Java, Perl, Python, C#, Ruby, Groovy, Java Script, etc. It has its own script, but it doesn’t limit it to that language. It can work with various languages and whatever the developers/testers are comfortable with.

Supports Operating Systems:

Selenium can operate and support across multiple Operating Systems (OS) like Windows, Mac, Linux, UNIX, etc. With Selenium Suite of solutions, a tailored testing suite can be created over any platform and then executed on another one. For instance, you can create test cases using Windows OS and run it with ease on a Linux based system.

Selenium integrates with programming languages and various frameworks. For instance, it can integrate with ANT or Maven type of framework for source code compilation. Further, it can integrate with TestNG testing framework for testing applications and reporting purposes. It can integrate with Jenkins or Hudson for Continuous Integration (CI) and can even integrate with other Open-Source tools to supports other features.

Tests across devices

Selenium Test Automation can be implemented for Mobile web application automation on Android, IPhone, and Blackberry. This can help in generating necessary results and address issues on a continuous basis.

Constant updates

Selenium support is community based and an active community support enable constant updates and upgrades. These upgrades are readily available and do not require specific training. This makes Selenium resourceful and cost-effective as well.

Loaded Selenium Suits

Selenium is not just a singular tool or utility, it a loaded package of various testing tools and so is referred to as a Suite. Each tool is designed to cater to different testing needs and requirements of test environments.

Additionally, Selenium comes with capabilities to support Selenium IDE, Selenium Grid, and Selenium Remote Control (RC).

Ease of implementation

Selenium offers a user-friendly interface that helps create and execute tests easily and effectively. Its Open-Source features help users to script their own extensions that makes them easy to develop customized actions and even manipulate at an advanced level.

Tests run directly across browsers and the users can watch while the tests are being executed. Additionally, Selenium’s reporting capabilities are one of the reasons for choosing it, as it allows testers to extract the results and take follow-up actions.

Reusability and Add-ons

Selenium Test Automation Framework uses scripts that can be tested directly across multiple browsers. Concurrently, it is possible to execute multiple tests with Selenium, as it covers almost all aspects of functional testing by implementing add-on tools that broaden the scope of testing.

Likewise, there is another school of thought that talks about some gaps in Selenium Automation Testing. For instance, Test Automation experts also say that Selenium is not an all-inclusive tool for automating the testing of web applications, as it needs third-party frameworks and language support to get absolutely functional and show the needed results.

Cigniti’s test automation CoE takes precedence in leveraging Selenium as a tool of choice for automating web application testing, performing functional regression automation, and developing automated tests. We have worked with some innovative businesses in North America to offer some phenomenal testing strategies and solutions.

The Cigniti team collaborated with a Philadelphia-based leading Academic Research Paper Publishing House to offer Testing Automation services by leveraging Selenium. The client was observing growing popularity of its research publications and its niche readership accessing the website had shot up.

The publishing house needed support with its website that required testing across browsers and Operating Systems (OS). The key challenge was to address the layout issues across different OS-device-browser combination. This was a challenge, as majority of the pages were syntactically incorrect. Additionally, the Cigniti team had to deal with functionality issues and JavaScript compatibility as well.

By leveraging Selenium Testing, Cigniti developed a utility using browser stack and executed multiple scripts simultaneously across browsers/OS combinations that helped address the functionality issues. Finally, the team achieved 100% test coverage for cross-browser compatibility.

Additionally, a Browser stack utility developed by Cigniti executed all test scripts across different browsers and OS combinations and identified bugs/defects much faster.

The publishing industry is highly fragmented and statistics show that North America is dominating the game. Additionally, a combination of factors such as literacy level, income level, changing life style, advertiser spending, technological changes, and government regulations are seen to impact industry dynamics significantly.

With our extensive experience in Selenium Testing, we are excited to invite you for our first TweetChat on the engaging topic Migrate to Selenium. Join the buzz and get all your queries and knowledge on the deck with our experts!